Charades
by Rose Stetson
Summary: Inspired by the LJ community SJ Everyday daily fix post from "Past and Present". Carter has some questions and surprisingly, O'Neill has a few answers.


**Charades**

Summary: Carter has some questions and surprisingly, O'Neill has a few answers.

Rating: K

Pairing: Implied SJ

* * *

Jack looks over at Sam, recognizing for a moment that she clearly needs a break from all this...amnesia stuff. "Carter, I order you to take a break."

"But sir..." She protests.

"No buts." He says, shaking his head. "Charades. One round of Charades."

She sighs, looking over at Daniel as if she's going to get his help in getting the Colonel off her back, but his attention is completely consumed by Ke'ra. Which, in her opinion, is both a good and a bad thing so soon after Sha're's death.

"Fine." She says, putting away the book she's been looking at for the last several hours. "But I'll compromise. I'll go first. If you get the answer in less than ninety seconds, I have to play for at least another ten minutes. If you don't get the answer in ninety seconds, then I can get back to the diary. Sound fair?"

Jack studies her for a moment, and she realizes for the hundredth time that he can see down to the very center of her and into the parts of herself that even she has forgotten exist.

"I'll take that bet." He says evenly.

She nods, inhaling before she thinks of a prompt. She raises her two fingers.

"Two words."

She nods and then motions putting the headphones of an iPod into her ears.

"Music."

She nods again, and then, she raises her pointer finger.

"First word."

She presses a hand to the back of her neck.

"Neck."

She shakes her head.

"Uh...hair."

She shakes her head again.

"Skull."

She shakes her head again.

"Spine."

She grimaces for a moment, shaking her head.

"Not spine, but close..." Jack says, watching her eyes closely.

She nods affirmatively. He can read her like an open book.

She looks briefly at her watch. Fifty-five seconds have passed. She's almost out of the clear.

"So...music. Kind of like spine." She can see the wheels turn in his head. Another ten seconds pass as he just studies her, his brain processing.

Finally, she raises her hand and shows him two fingers.

"Second word."

She nods before she taps lightly against the table.

"Table."

She shakes her head. Another fifteen seconds. He's down to ten seconds.

"Um...wood."

She shakes her head again. Seven seconds.

"Finger."

Five seconds.

"Nail."

Three seconds.

He seems oddly cool for someone who is about to lose.

"Time." She announces as she sees the last second turn. "It was..."

"Spinal Tap." He says with a secretive smile.

"How did you..." She begins, absolutely floored.

"Come on...spine? Music? Spinal Tap is the only choice."

"Then, why..."

"You just needed a break, Carter. I'm lucky if I can get you to take ninety seconds away from your work."

She smiles softly as she realizes once again how wise he is despite his attempts to make himself look ignorant, easily confused, and generally adolescent. She shakes the thoughts from her mind as she picks up one of the books again.

Something in the pensive look she sees on the Colonel's face tells her that he's got something else going on in his mind.

"Sir?"

He looks up, startled out of his thoughts. "Oh. I was just thinking about amnesia. It doesn't quite track with Linea's nickname."

"The Destroyer of Worlds." Teal'c adds, often so quiet that even the two seasoned officers had forgotten he was standing so close.

"Yeah, that one." O'Neill says, nodding.

"Well, actually, in sort of a sick way, it does." She says, returning to the position she'd been in for her clue about "spinal tap". "Ke'ra said herself their society was on the verge of collapse, despite their efforts. This world is in trouble, Sir."

"Perhaps Linea was experimenting with other ways in which to destroy worlds." Teal'c says, insightfully.

"Variety being the spice of life and all?"

Sam tenses as she remembers how naive they'd been to let the seemingly harmless woman out of prison. "The fact is, Sir, we let Linea out of Hadante prison. We gave her everything she needed to know about the network of Stargates to go anywhere she wanted."

"I know." He says as if he doesn't want to hear whatever she's about to say.

"We're responsible, sir." She says, regretfully.

"I know." He says in resignation.

She sighs as she looks back at Daniel and then at Teal'c, and then, at the Colonel. It was clear that their explorations were extracting a toll on them - one that they weren't even necessarily aware of. She thinks of the memories that Jolinar had left in her brain and the feeling that keeps haunting her. Emotion makes you weak; emotion leaves you vulnerable to attack and mistake.

"Do you think we're wrong?" She finally asks.

"About what?"

"Caring about what happens to the rest of the galaxy? Is that wrong?"

She doesn't voice her questions very often, probably for the same reason that the Tok'ra are afraid of emotion.

"Why wouldn't we care?"

"Well, you have to admit that compassion is what got us into this mess." She says, logically. "Wouldn't Vyos have been better off if we'd just left Linnea there?"

"Yes. But that's only one case." O'Neill says, sounding wise again. "How many people would have been hurt if we weren't compassionate?"

She sighs, and he studies her again. "What?"

"I have this...voice...in my head." She admits. "I think it's the leftover part of Jolinar."

"Yeah?"

"It keeps telling me that we'd be safer if we didn't take on everyone else's problems."

"Safer maybe." He admits. "But we also wouldn't be human, would we?"

She is silent for a few moments, thinking seriously about his words.

"Look, Carter," he begins, looking at her in that way that makes her feel naked in front of him with every deeply hidden fear and pressed down emotion visible only to him. She wishes he would stop. "If the Tok'ra had everything all figured out, the goa'uld would have been beaten by now."

She can't argue with that logic.

"Now, maybe we're making some mistakes." He admits. "But we're also changing the way the game is played. We're taking the fight back to the goa'uld. Not one Tok'ra operative at a time. One system lord at a time. Now, this may be a battle we fight for the rest of our natural lives, but when I see the gratitude in the faces of the people who have been freed..." He gets oddly emotional for a moment. "Well, that's all the confirmation that I need to know I'm doing the right thing."

"And what about the people who get caught in the cross-fire?" She asks simply.

He looks over at Teal'c, now kelnoreeming in the corner, and then he looks back at her. "In the words of a very wise Jaffa, they die free."

She nods, looking down at the old wooden table again.

"In the battle between good and evil, there are always innocent casualties." He says, soberly. "The trick is to make sure their sacrifice is worth something."

She thinks about Jonas for a moment, and how he'd enslaved a whole people in an effort to make them worship him. She thinks about Sha're and Skaara who were taken host by the goa'uld against their will. She thinks about Teal'c's family on Chulak who are living without a husband and father. She thinks about Cassandra who is the last survivor of her people and who was almost a weapon used to put an end to Stargate Command. She thinks about her own father who spends more time in secret missions with the Tok'ra than she remembers him spending as an Air Force Colonel when she was growing up. She thinks about Jolinar who took her host against her will out of sheer desperation and then sacrificed her life so that Sam could return to hers.

Will it ever end?

Jack looks at her for a moment, and she realizes she verbalized her thought.

"I don't know, Carter." He says, honestly. "I don't know."


End file.
